Looking beneath the surface

November 21, 2012

PEI, has spent a lot of development money from the Feds on new rinks etc and of course on a new road. But other than the wages of the workers, what of this money has put PEI in a better place for the future?

Here is what Chatanooga did instead. They used their Fed development money to make the city, the best internet and most wired city in America. It cost $111 million. (Link NYT Tom Friedman)

"The majority of Chattanooga homes and businesses get 50 megabits per second, some 100 megabits, a few 250 and those with big needs opt for a full gigabit per second, explained Harold DePriest, the chief executive of EPB, the city’s electric power and telecom provider, which built and operates the network. “The average around the country is 4.5 megabits per second.” So average Internet speed in Chattanooga is 10 times the national average.

That doesn’t just mean faster downloads. The fiber grid means 150,000 Chattanooga homes now have smart electric meters to track their energy consumption in real time. More important, said DePriest, on July 5, Chattanooga got hit with an unusual storm that knocked out power to 80,000 homes. Thanks to intelligent power switching on the fiber network, he said, “42,000 homes had their electricity restored in ... 2 seconds.” Old days: 17 hours."

And this has meant that business is flocking there as are people who need the web.

"Chattanooga replaced its belching smokestacks with an Amazon.com fulfillment center, major health care and insurance companies and a beehive of tech start-ups that all thrive on big data and super-high-speed Internet."

As the web becomes the key, communities that offer the best connections will attract the best work. And for the web, location does not matter. In the industrial world, PEI is on the edge. On the web it could be in the centre.

A really weird thought has been building in me for months. Have books been a bad thing?

Is this better?

If so – why?

If so – Is this the campfire of all campfires?

So what’s my argument?

Many people are convinced today that the birth of the web is making us stupid. That the web is only superficial. That only dense books can contain and spread real knowledge.

I am coming to the conclusion that the opposite is true. That books make us stupid and that the web, like the campfire and for the same reasons as for the campfire is what makes us clever.

So here goes. All our foundational knowledge was discovered around the campfire. Imagine you a hominid sitting around the fire at night. You are awake. You are looking at each other. I would imagine that at first, before we could speak, we sang or made music together. The fire elicited a social dance of interaction and community.

I think we can surmise that the campfire helped us speak and so it helped us become conscious. Something like this happened about 100,000 – 60,000 years ago. For suddenly our tool development, art and technology took off. All the foundations of our world today were discovered in a 10,000 year period. Tools had been the same for a million years. Within a 1,000 years they were completely different. We invented pottery. We invented metallurgy. The wheel. Everything we depend on was discovered then. Not only discovered but widely disseminated in a short period of time.

How did this occur?

My bet is that it happened because of the social process created by the campfire and by our hunter gatherer culture of equality. Such an environment extracts order from chaos. Design from intuition. It is ideal for the exploration of implicit knowledge. It is ideal for discovering things that we don’t know exist. It is ideal for taking half baked ideas and refining them. Let’s use a thought experiment.

How did pottery get invented? Surely no one said “Let’s have a project to invent Pottery!” How can you invent something that had never existed? No it must have happened like this – The People stopped for the night after a rainfall. The next morning, as they prepared to leave, the fire keeper noticed that beneath the coals that she was harvesting, the ground had baked to a crust. Maybe she could carry the fire in this thing – this bowl. That night as they shared the food around the fire, she told the people what had happened and showed them the “bowl” that she had lifted out of the earth the day before. And the conversation began – how had that been? Did it hold the fire well? What else could it hold? What if we put it back in the fire? Would it hold water? And on and on. Experiments were made. Some earth worked better than others. At the seasonal meeting with the Cousin Peoples, the People shared their story with the others and gave up a “bowl” as a gift their elder. At the next season meeting, the two tribes spent days sharing the stories of the experiments that they had been making…….

There was no peer review. There was no authorized way of doing it. No one was telling anyone. They were sharing and asking and arguing. They were having conversations!

But with the book comes authority. With the advent of the book, much of knowledge development stopped. Only the in group was allowed to play. What mattered was not observation. Not trial and error. Not experiment. Not sharing. But authority. Most of the accepted authority were texts that had no basis in observation or trial and error. Ptolemy, St Augustine and Galen ruled.

Worse because of the “Book” people who did observe or test were killed or persecuted. The Book stood for the ONE WAY. It spoke not you.

For a while, with the advent of the press, knowledge opened up.

But where did the great advances then come from? Did they come from the Universities? No they came from amateurs – from Natural Philosophers. Who met in clubs over dinner to talk about their work. Gradually, the “BOOK” came back. Only papers written and approved inside the authority system counted as being right. People outside the authority system were discounted.

Knowledge was seen as an explicit thing – an object. The Book was its metaphor.

But now with the web, we have a global campfire. Once again, we can play with ideas, with observations and experiments. Once again we can share with equals who will not knock us down. Even better, this time the group around the fire is not 35 people but all of us.

What new things will come from such a process? Surely amazing things. Things that could never have come from the use of books.

March 17, 2010

In my posts about CAP sites and Canada's now sad position globally on the web - I mentioned Doug Hull - whom I see as being the best public servant in the country. I forgot to mention, that of course he was pushed out. Here is the record of his time at Industry Canada:

From 1992 to 2001 Mr. Hull, working as Director General of the Information Highways Branch of Industry Canada, successfully envisioned, designed and executed major elements of the Government of Canada’s Connectedness Strategy, which aimed to place Canada at the forefront of Internet access and usage.

On completion of his work Canada had indeed moved from 7 th to 1 st place in terms of Internet penetration levels. (Canada is now #12)

Have a look at what he did - this is truly visionary - it was organic too - for instance the Digital Collections Program enabled teen agers to get paid experience - silverorange on PEI was born out of this program as the then boys worked for Veterans Affairs. Doug knew how to get at the points of leverage. As you look over his work you can see that he did not take a blockbuster approach but was a Gardener - he created an ecosystem that supported itself and interacted with itself.

P.E.I.’s network of 38 Community Access Program (CAP) sites will not be closing after all, says federal Industry Minister Tony Clement.

In a one-on-one interview with The Guardian Tuesday, Clement confirmed all of the sites will remain open. He said funding will continue throughout the 2010 year.

“All 38 are going to be funded,” Clement said from Ottawa. “They’ll be funding out of a different fund but no one really cares about that. That’s just internal accounting. What they care about is the fact they are going to be funded and they will be.”

Last week, Industry Canada sent letters to CAP site operators informing them the funding criteria had changed. The federal government said any group within 25 kilometres of a library would no longer be funded. Because of P.E.I.’s network of small, community-based libraries, that would have meant none of the province’s 38 CAP sites would qualify for funding.

Prince Edward Island would have been the only province to lose all of its CAP sites.

But Clement said the funding was never in jeopardy. He blames poor communications.

The federal minister said P.E.I. will continue to get the same level of funding this year. He would not say what will happen after the 2010 year.

In 1994, Doug Hull, the best civil servant in the country, developed a comprehensive plan for getting Canada off the ground for the web. He got his minister (IC) and the his ex boss the Minister of Finance's attention and the Schoolnet program and CAP sites were the outcome.

He aimed at where kids were and directly at the digital divide - still points of leverage. He made the web part of the core plans of the country.

OK so the money for poor old PEI is back - for a year - but where is the vision?

The US has been backward regarding the web as well. Like Canada, it has been content to protect our terrible IP's and has been fussing about copyright.

But the new US plan is clear - the web is the railroad - the highway system - steam - it is the platform on which the economy and society will be based.

As Doug and I talked about all of this 16 years ago, we kept returning to the memory that Canada was created as a nation by a project to build a connecting network - the CPR.

That dream - The National Dream - is more valid than ever. Doug and Paul Martin saw it back when the web was tiny. Now that it is pervasive but Canada has fallen way behind, where is the vision?

Come on Ottawa and the 5th floor - you can surely do better than this?

September 05, 2009

Newspapers were struck a death blow by Craigslist - We all know that story. But what was it like when Craisglist just got started and we did not know that was going to happen? What will it be like when a new "Craigslist" enters a new sector with all the potential to disrupt?

Well today I read 4 articles that lead me to believe that Universities - as we know them - are DEAD! The Death Star has arrived and in the end - there can be no defence.

Article 1 - The NYT - 25% of kids are unemployed - this includes most graduates who also have large student loans. If they get jobs it is in the McJob world. It will take years for this to change - see my post below - meanwhile the debt has to be paid and the summer jobs are not there. But if you don't have a degree - there is no employment that will pay enough to raise a middle class family - so there is a paradox

Article 2 - Why University costs are so high and so impossible to cut - basically the President has no power over the faculty - like the print union at the paper - the faculty have a lock on how work is done and how they are paid and will not give this up.

Article 3 (Via John Robb) A story on a new way of getting a degree on your own at your own pace for $99 a course at Straightline. A real degree using all the same material with better access to teaching - all at your onw pace and time - all at home.

Here why I say DEATH. If universities cannot change their costs. If unemployment for the young lasts a decade and the only way of paying is debt - then the "smart" kids and parents will find "smart" alternatives. Straighterline is maybe the Craigslist challenge.

It's all about the economics - isn't it?

What do you think? More after the Jump from the article by Kevin Carey

November 12, 2008

An announcement was made today that Aliant will by 2009 provide highspeed for rural PEI.

CHARLOTTETOWN, PEI -- Premier Robert Ghiz today
announced in the Legislative Assembly that the Government of Prince
Edward Island has entered into a development agreement with Aliant that
will see Aliant investing $8.2 million to extend broadband services to
every community in Prince Edward Island, the establishment of a $1.0
million Joint Innovation Fund and the renewal of the government’s
telecommunications contract.

Before we all cheer too loudly, I would like to know what happened to the millions given to Aliant to do this nearly a decade ago. Check the comments in this link for the details of the disaster of the last promise.

Island Tel (now Aliant), who received $3.2 million
of PEI government money to build an Island broadband network. Here's
the meat of the news release from 1997:

"Premier Pat Binns today announced a bold initiative designed to
catapult Prince Edward Island (PEI) into the forefront of the
Information Age, recasting it from Canada's smallest province to the
country's smartest province. The project is meant to create a massive
increase in technology use in PEI, and revolutionize the way the world
views the province.
PEI, in cooperation with Island Tel Advanced Solutions, Newbridge
Networks and Sun Microsystems of Canada Inc., has begun building one of
the most pervasive broadband communications networks in the world.
Stretching from one end of PEI to the other, and joined by fibre optics
to the mainland, the PEI Broadband Network will offer citizens,
students, educators, business and government networked applications at
some of the lowest costs available anywhere.

From high-speed Internet access and full-motion videoconferencing,
to remote curriculum delivery and collaborative multimedia software
development, this new infrastructure will transform the province into
an ideal information technology testbed. Partnerships are being pursued
with networking hardware and software firms and content creators. More
importantly, unlike broadband networks in other provinces and states,
PEI's will deliver top-speed connections into all parts of the
province, not just a neighbourhood here and an industrial park there.

"We are pleased and excited to be building this critical piece of
21st century infrastructure today in Prince Edward Island. It heralds a
big change in the relationship we have with the rest of the world,"
said Premier Binns."

All over North America the issue has been the same, the Big Pipes,
have taken the money to connect rural communities and failed to
deliver. We have to build around them. Why?